The Frightening Privilege of Finding Out

When the monastic heart ceases to be an idea and becomes the place where one must live

“Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

— Abba Moses

For years I have spoken of the monastic heart as something universal.

I have insisted that the desert does not belong only to monks, that hesychia is not the possession of those behind monastery walls, and that the summons to purity of heart is nothing other than the Gospel addressed to every human being. The monk makes visible in a particular form what belongs to every Christian: the movement from dispersion to simplicity, from possession to poverty, from self-will to surrender, from the divided heart to the one thing needful.

I believed this.

I still believe it.

But there is a great difference between believing something and being asked to discover whether it is true.

Perhaps this is what I have only gradually begun to understand about City a Desert. I thought at times that it was a work, a ministry, a collection of books and conversations, a way of bringing the wisdom of the Fathers into the circumstances of contemporary life.

Perhaps it was all of these things.

But increasingly I wonder whether it was also a place being prepared for me to inhabit.

The desert Fathers did not go into the desert primarily because they had something to say about it. They went because they desired God. They allowed themselves to be deprived of the structures by which a human being ordinarily establishes who he is. Reputation, position, usefulness, security, recognition—even certain forms of religious importance—could become impediments if the heart began to rest in them rather than in God.

The desert asked a terrible question:

If these things disappear, is Christ enough?

There is no theoretical answer to that question.

It must be lived.

And perhaps this is why the present moment feels both frightening and strangely familiar. Much of what once gave outward shape to my life has become uncertain. I do not know precisely what form the future will take. I cannot secure beforehand what I will be called, what place I will occupy, what work I will be permitted to do, or how others will understand what has happened.

Yet beneath all of this uncertainty there is something remarkably simple.

Christ remains.

The Name remains.

Prayer remains.

My mother remains before me as the person whom Providence has presently given me to love.

The ordinary duties of the house remain.

The silence remains.

And perhaps that is enough.

The Fathers understood that the cell eventually removes our abstractions. One can speak beautifully about poverty until something precious is taken away. One can praise obedience until one’s own designs collapse. One can write about hiddenness while still hoping secretly to be seen. One can speak about dying with Christ while carefully preserving the identity one fears to lose.

Then comes the hour when the words must become flesh.

This is the frightening privilege.

To find out whether what I have written is true.

Not whether it is intellectually defensible. Not whether others admire it. Not whether it can sustain a ministry or provide an identity.

Whether a human being can actually live this way.

Can I become small without becoming bitter?

Can I become hidden without demanding that someone notice my hiddenness?

Can I relinquish an identity without immediately constructing another?

Can I stand before Christ open-handed and allow Him to determine what remains?

The modern elders continually return us to this poverty. The spiritual life is not ultimately the acquisition of religious experiences or even virtues considered as possessions. It is the gradual surrender of the false self that believes it must secure its own existence. Hesychia exposes this because silence removes so many of the places where that self hides.

Eventually there is simply a man before God.

Nothing to prove.

Nothing to defend.

Nothing to become except what grace makes of him.

Perhaps this is the deepest meaning of the monastic heart.

It is not primarily a vocation within the Church alongside other vocations. It is the baptismal movement buried within every Christian life: dying and rising with Christ until the life we possess is no longer something we clutch as our own.

The monk gives this movement an outward form.

But life itself can become a monastery.

A kitchen can become a cell.

Caring for an aging mother can become obedience.

Fatigue can become poverty.

Uncertainty can become fasting.

The repetition of ordinary duties can become a rule.

And the Name of Jesus whispered through the rooms of a quiet house can become the bell calling the heart back from dispersion.

Then the distinction between desert and city begins to disappear.

The desert is wherever everything unnecessary is being stripped away so that God may become necessary.

Perhaps City a Desert was always pointing toward this.

Not toward turning the city into a monastery, nor toward importing monastic forms into lives for which they were never intended. Something simpler and more demanding: discovering that the human heart itself is the place where the desert must appear.

And now I find myself being asked to enter what I have spent years describing.

There is fear in that.

There should be.

The desert is not romantic when one actually enters it.

But there is also an unexpected freedom.

I do not need to know what lies beyond the desert.

I am not Providence.

I do not need to arrange the meaning of what has happened or determine beforehand what God will make of what remains of my life.

I need only consent to where I have been placed.

To care for the person before me.

To pray.

To work.

To repent.

To keep watch over the heart.

To receive each day without possessing the next.

And when fear asks what will become of me, perhaps the only answer necessary is the Name:

Jesus Christ.

The Fathers went into the desert to discover whether God alone was enough.

Perhaps every Christian, sooner or later, is brought to that same threshold.

Not necessarily through monastery gates.

Sometimes through illness.

Sometimes through grief.

Sometimes through failure.

Sometimes through the collapse of an identity.

Sometimes through an ordinary house growing increasingly silent as two people grow old together.

The geography matters less than the surrender.

For the true desert begins wherever a person finally ceases arranging his own salvation and stands before God with empty hands.

I have written for years about the monastic heart.

Now comes the frightening privilege of finding out whether it is true.

And perhaps the answer will not be another book, another argument, another explanation, or another identity.

Perhaps the answer must simply become a life.

A small life.

A hidden life.

A life gathered increasingly into one prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.